What _we_ does or says is called
custom, what it thinks is called opinion, what it believes to be
beautiful or good is called fashion. Among such nations as these _we_ is
the brain, the conscience, the reason, the taste, and the judgment of
all. The individual finds everything decided for him without his
troubling about it. He is dispensed from the task of finding out
anything whatever. Provided that he imitates, copies, and repeats the
models furnished by _we_, he has nothing more to fear. He knows all that
he need know, and has entered into salvation.
April 29, 1874.--Strange reminiscence! At the end of the terrace of La
Treille, on the eastern side, as I looked down the slope, it seemed to
me that I saw once more in imagination a little path which existed there
when I was a child, and ran through the bushy underwood, which was
thicker then than it is now. It is at least forty years since this
impression disappeared from my mind. The revival of an image so dead and
so forgotten set me thinking. Consciousness seems to be like a book, in
which the leaves turned by life successively cover and hide each other
in spite of their semi-transparency; but although the book may be open
at the page of the present, the wind, for a few seconds, may blow back
the first pages into view.
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